5 ms·

It’s unclear what Section 230 executive order will do to social media companies

38 points by jbegley 6y ago

ardit33 6y ago
Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to de-exist and can't be above the congress.... At most there will be courts involved, and the order will be considered null and void. Similar to many of his executive provisions that got declared invalid by the courts. This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now. Basically another political show/childs play from our president
- roosterdawn 6y ago
  Bingo. Checks and balances.
  - drawkbox 6y ago
    > Bingo. Checks and balances By that you mean games, actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here.
    - save_ferris 6y ago
      Care to provide some evidence to back this assertion up?
      - drawkbox 6y ago
        Art of the "Deal"
    - roosterdawn 6y ago
      > actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here. Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive leadership, but if this is what you think a mafia state is, I wonder what you would call the situation in other countries where things are significantly worse.
      - drawkbox 6y ago
        The world runs on self-interest and leverage, people seem to have forgotten that. The current climate screams this reality. The zero-sum game disciples are in power and calling the shots. I don't personally subscribe or believe in that ideology but it cannot be denied that the current state of the world is steeped in it. In game theory, if the other side cheats and your side keeps cooperating, you will lose every time. There is a great little game theory game that highlights it here called The Evolution of Trust [1]. [1] https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
- illuminated 6y ago
  The Pavlov effect over his actions taught him so far he can basically do whatever he wants without any repercussion. Wrongdoing anything? Noone could call for his accountability. You're investigating him? You'll be fired. And every successor of yours who does the same. You're his friend or donor getting in trouble with law? No problem, it will be taken away. So, yes, I'd think twice before saying any of his actions would do "nothing".
- alharith 6y ago
  Dismissing this as some petty doom-to-fail attempt to fulfill some narcissistic desire would be foolish, as recent presidential history, from GW and especially through Obama has shown us the levels we have allowed executive overreach to rise. Obama designed the blueprint for achieving things without Congressional approval.
  - nickff 6y ago
    Executive branch powers have been increasing at least since the Great Depression, arguably beginning with or before Teddy Roosevelt.
    - alharith 6y ago
      Sure, but not to this degree. We are in perpetual war, excuse me, "targeted campaigns in the interest of National Security" because of the last two.
  - pwned1 6y ago
    If you think executive overreach started with GW, then I suggest you go back a little further in history... around 70 years or so.
    - alharith 6y ago
      See my sibling comment. If you think the overreach the last 2 decades is the same as the previous 5 then I don’t really know what to tell you.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nostromo 6y ago
  > Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to de-exist and can't be above the congress.... You may want to read the article. He's not saying Twitter "can't exist" (and why would he? It's his platform of choice.) -- it seems like they're going to say that if social media companies start editing content, they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content. This could be very problematic for Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who would suddenly be open to a lot of lawsuits based on their users' content.
  - lr 6y ago
    The easy thing to do is to have two policies: one for politicians, and one for everyone else. The policy for politicians will be one that holds their actions to a much higher standard than everyone else. The policy can say that metrics will be used to determine if the statements by the politician are false or misleading, and if a certain threshold is reached, they can/will(/should!) be banned from the site. They can provide a detailed analysis about how they came to the conclusion to ban the user.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      Who is a politician and who isn’t?
      - lr 6y ago
        Thanks for the point of clarification: Elected officials, which should be easy for any social media company to determine, especially since, at least on Twitter and Instagram, they have "verified" profiles.
  - ueueshitashita 6y ago
    > they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content They could and have been sued all along. Plenty of people file inane lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and Google all the time for content that gets posted on their services. I wouldn't be quick to imply that these lawsuits would result in successful outcomes for the plaintiffs would it not have been for the existence of Section 230.
- tw000001 6y ago
  >This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now. You don't think it's a problem that a platform which controls the information that reaches millions of eyes, acting as a mouthpiece for the president, applies a totally subjective "fact check" disclaimer based on an uncharitable interpretation of the president's tweet, while pretending to be politically neutral? And while ignoring similar misstatements from other politicians on both sides of the aisle? The issue here, and I cannot stress how dangerous this is for society, is that an entity which gatekeeps information for millions of eyes, is pretending to be a neutral party while overtly manipulating the messages of politicians from one political party. This creates a manufactured consensus which is influences policy and elections according to the whims of a handful of high level managers/executives at Twitter. It's an abhorrent concentration of unnofficial, unchecked soft power and it was hugely irresponsible and unethical for Twitter to publicly pick a side without a massive disclaimer. This isn't even getting into the holes in the "fact check". What a joke. How much hubris do you need to believe that your tech company can act as an arbiter of truth?
  - eunoia 6y ago
    You and I see different problems here. To me, the problem is a platform (and therefore legitimacy) has been granted to someone who abuses that power at every turn. We (those arguing against you) are not empowering Twitter as the new POTUS, merely trying to minimize the current one’s ability to cause damage via lies and hateful rhetoric. (Things you or I would have been banned for years ago) There will come a time to deal with Twitter’s societal overreach too.
    - tw000001 6y ago
      >lies and hateful rhetoric There is simply no objective definition for either of these concepts and if you may be fine with Twitter having this kind of power now, but you may regret it if the shoe is ever on the other foot. Having a corporate arbiter of truth is antithetical to a free society, especially when creating one's own platform is impractical because of network effects. Who is going to fact check the fact checker? Effectively Twitter has the final word because this is their platform - not because they are correct, and if these political squabbles had an objectively correct answer then we wouldn't have multiple parties. People are find with it right now because it's en Vogue to hate on the president, but that doesn't mean the fact checking is justified or even honest - and I reiterate, the dangerous part here is that people implicitly take Twitter to be an authority when they absolutely are not. Their fact check isn't even accurate, but people don't tend to question what they want to hear. Twitter's role is a neutral party - the same way that journalists are ultimately doing a disservice to society by editorializing everything while claiming to be neutral. It is dishonest and divides society from the top down.
- gwright 6y ago
  This seems overly simplistic to me and premature. You are declaring "null and void" something that you haven't seen (at least I was unable to find the actual text just now). Obviously any President has lots of legal options when deciding how any law is applied and interpreted. It appears that this is a shot across the bow from a political standpoint or to use another military metaphor, Trump is attempting to shape the battlefield on this issue and there are indeed lots of legitimate issues regarding Section 230.
Johnjonjoan 6y ago
"While signing the executive order on Thursday, the president said he would shut down Twitter if his lawyers found a way to do it. "I'd have to go through a legal process," he told reporters." Cutting off the nose to spite the face
- vmception 6y ago
  Hm, if I wanted to do it I would hit them with the federal FOSTA-SESTA law targeting their complacency with sex worker's profiles, and also coordinate with states to levy charges related to hosting child pornography and failing federal record keeping obligations (2257a), then use that to assume their normal financial transactions are illegitimate so leveraging wire fraud statutes, and then hit them with securities fraud statues because they lied/omitted information about all those issues to their shareholders, have the SEC freeze their stock, really prepare to get civil forfeiture laws challenged by freezing their domestic assets too under the assumption of illegality in separate charges against their assets instead of Twitter itself. Twitter should be able to beat all of it, but the point would get made and shareholders would bounce as soon as they could. Don't forget to seize the website in the process. None of this represents my opinion. It would be negligent to not notice the tools already exist.
- function_seven 6y ago
  Assuming he could nuke Twitter off the face of the planet, I wouldn't see it as nose-cutting. His 80,430,710 followers would follow him to Facebook or Instagram. Or even Gab. His direct pipeline would remain intact.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    I'm not sure most of them would, especially if it was Gab or something more obscure still. Ironically I think initially at least to get the message across he'd rely on coverage of whatever platform he chose to vent on coming from his other bugbear: mainstream media.
    - function_seven 6y ago
_jal 6y ago
Why does anyone pretend this is about anything other than changing the subject? He's approaching an election with a crashed economy and a plague he doesn't know how to handle. His range of motion thus far has been limited to yelling, whining and changing the subject, and the first two are not working.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
api 6y ago
Little to nothing. The point is to troll and stir controversy in order to get attention. The man literally built his entire career on that, and unfortunately it works extremely well.
kyledrake 6y ago
Does anyone have an actual link to the text of the order itself?
- stevula 6y ago
  This is the alleged leaked draft from the other day: https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-Preventing-Online-Censorship.pdf https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nojito 6y ago
One thing is for sure. No more ability to cut costs like they have had the luxury to do so thus far.
hn2017 6y ago
Who knew that the right wing would be the one trying to limit free speech of private companies??
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  How does this limit the free speech of private companies? Does a company have free speech?
  - newacct583 6y ago
    > How does this limit the free speech of private companies? Does a company have free speech? Yes! And very broadly so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC (Which, as much as it pains me as a hippie liberal to admit it, is probably the best decision in context. Enshrining even things like corporate election finance as "speech" makes is VERY clear that government regulation of actual opinion on behalf of private entities is verboten. At the time none of us saw Trump coming, but if the price for protecting a twitter correction is a bunch of Comcast-funded PACs? Yeah, I'll pay that.)
- newacct583 6y ago
  Yeah, that's the truly horrifying thing here. As others are pointing out, the EO itself is just theater, precisely because the actual first amendment of these companies and their employees protect them from the government (or have so far, anyway). To wit: Twitter has the same right to tell you the president is lying that the president does to speak via tweet in the first place. The thing that strikes me is that the political tribe that crows about this stuff constantly, when faced with an actual attempt by the executive branch to control the speech of private entities... is absent. Where is the HN libertarian debate squad now? Fucking crickets is all I hear. I despair for society.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
I'm reminded of this cheeky comic from 2009[1], which shows Obama in the caves Mt Doom with the ring, inscribed on it "executive privilege" and "state secrets". Not wanting to forfeit its power, he decides to keep it. Now here we are, with executive orders flying out the door. Slowly, surely, we have allowed an unprecedented growth in executive action. Haven't we decided already that it's okay to be in a perpetual state of war since 2001? Why have we allowed the military industrial complex keep us embroiled in foreign wars for half of our lives? And if you want a glimpse at how powerful and non-partisan this complex is, look at the pushback the president received when he tried simply to pull out of Syria. 1. http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-them-all/ http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-them...
- remarkEon 6y ago
  The pushback about the Syria pullout was absolutely insane to me. If there was a conflict that was going to trigger a NATO Article 5 invocation that was it. Russia, Syria, Turkey (a NATO member for reasons that escapes me) ... it all had the feeling of a trigger point, and still people wanted us to keep lobbing missiles and sending troops to a conflict we had no business being involved in.
dang 6y ago
The main thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161
ordu 6y ago
Politicians are trying to turn everything into politics. A politician was caught on a lie? The lie is insubstantial, because an accusation of a politician is politics by definition, isn't it?
torrzza 6y ago
It would be really funny if Twitter decided to just ban Trump's account outright. Preferably some three or four weeks before election.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 6y ago
So, at this point, the Covid 19 death toll has surpassed 100,000. Even if we can only attribute a small fraction of those deaths to Trump's complete negligence and mishandling, Trump's actions have led to more deaths than September 11--Trump has literally killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden. So I don't think we need to talk about Section 230 to show that he's a terrible president. That said, I'm having trouble seeing how Trump is wrong in his application of Section 230. Section 230 was intended to protect free-speech platforms by allowing them to eschew editorial control without being held responsible for what users say. If Twitter starts exercising editorial control, then doesn't that mean that they should be held responsible for what's said on their platform? This strikes me as Twitter wanting to have their cake and eat it too: they don't want to the legal liability of editorial control, but they don't want the bad PR of allowing free speech on their platform. If we're actually basing our laws and their enforcement on principles, then we a) have to decide whether Twitter is a content platform or a communication platform, and b) we can't just abandon our principles because Trump accidentally says something correct.

38 points by jbegley 6y ago

Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to de-exist and can't be above the congress.... At most there will be courts involved, and the order will be considered null and void. Similar to many of his executive provisions that got declared invalid by the courts. This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now. Basically another political show/childs play from our president

roosterdawn 6y ago
Bingo. Checks and balances.
- drawkbox 6y ago
  > Bingo. Checks and balances By that you mean games, actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Care to provide some evidence to back this assertion up?
    - drawkbox 6y ago
      Art of the "Deal"
  - roosterdawn 6y ago
    > actual checks and account balances from bribes right? Just another mafia state style leverage play here. Not that things cannot be significantly improved or that I'm not extremely disappointed with our level of political executive leadership, but if this is what you think a mafia state is, I wonder what you would call the situation in other countries where things are significantly worse.
    - drawkbox 6y ago
      The world runs on self-interest and leverage, people seem to have forgotten that. The current climate screams this reality. The zero-sum game disciples are in power and calling the shots. I don't personally subscribe or believe in that ideology but it cannot be denied that the current state of the world is steeped in it. In game theory, if the other side cheats and your side keeps cooperating, you will lose every time. There is a great little game theory game that highlights it here called The Evolution of Trust [1]. [1] https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
illuminated 6y ago
The Pavlov effect over his actions taught him so far he can basically do whatever he wants without any repercussion. Wrongdoing anything? Noone could call for his accountability. You're investigating him? You'll be fired. And every successor of yours who does the same. You're his friend or donor getting in trouble with law? No problem, it will be taken away. So, yes, I'd think twice before saying any of his actions would do "nothing".
alharith 6y ago
Dismissing this as some petty doom-to-fail attempt to fulfill some narcissistic desire would be foolish, as recent presidential history, from GW and especially through Obama has shown us the levels we have allowed executive overreach to rise. Obama designed the blueprint for achieving things without Congressional approval.
- nickff 6y ago
  Executive branch powers have been increasing at least since the Great Depression, arguably beginning with or before Teddy Roosevelt.
  - alharith 6y ago
    Sure, but not to this degree. We are in perpetual war, excuse me, "targeted campaigns in the interest of National Security" because of the last two.
- pwned1 6y ago
  If you think executive overreach started with GW, then I suggest you go back a little further in history... around 70 years or so.
  - alharith 6y ago
    See my sibling comment. If you think the overreach the last 2 decades is the same as the previous 5 then I don’t really know what to tell you.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nostromo 6y ago
> Nothing.... the President is not a king and can't order people/companies to de-exist and can't be above the congress.... You may want to read the article. He's not saying Twitter "can't exist" (and why would he? It's his platform of choice.) -- it seems like they're going to say that if social media companies start editing content, they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content. This could be very problematic for Facebook, Twitter, and Google, who would suddenly be open to a lot of lawsuits based on their users' content.
- lr 6y ago
  The easy thing to do is to have two policies: one for politicians, and one for everyone else. The policy for politicians will be one that holds their actions to a much higher standard than everyone else. The policy can say that metrics will be used to determine if the statements by the politician are false or misleading, and if a certain threshold is reached, they can/will(/should!) be banned from the site. They can provide a detailed analysis about how they came to the conclusion to ban the user.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    Who is a politician and who isn’t?
    - lr 6y ago
      Thanks for the point of clarification: Elected officials, which should be easy for any social media company to determine, especially since, at least on Twitter and Instagram, they have "verified" profiles.
- ueueshitashita 6y ago
  > they're no longer platforms and instead publishers, who can be sued for their content They could and have been sued all along. Plenty of people file inane lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter and Google all the time for content that gets posted on their services. I wouldn't be quick to imply that these lawsuits would result in successful outcomes for the plaintiffs would it not have been for the existence of Section 230.
tw000001 6y ago
>This is just a narcissistic/rage hissy fits, or just another attempt to create noise and detract from the real issues of this country is facing now. You don't think it's a problem that a platform which controls the information that reaches millions of eyes, acting as a mouthpiece for the president, applies a totally subjective "fact check" disclaimer based on an uncharitable interpretation of the president's tweet, while pretending to be politically neutral? And while ignoring similar misstatements from other politicians on both sides of the aisle? The issue here, and I cannot stress how dangerous this is for society, is that an entity which gatekeeps information for millions of eyes, is pretending to be a neutral party while overtly manipulating the messages of politicians from one political party. This creates a manufactured consensus which is influences policy and elections according to the whims of a handful of high level managers/executives at Twitter. It's an abhorrent concentration of unnofficial, unchecked soft power and it was hugely irresponsible and unethical for Twitter to publicly pick a side without a massive disclaimer. This isn't even getting into the holes in the "fact check". What a joke. How much hubris do you need to believe that your tech company can act as an arbiter of truth?
- eunoia 6y ago
  You and I see different problems here. To me, the problem is a platform (and therefore legitimacy) has been granted to someone who abuses that power at every turn. We (those arguing against you) are not empowering Twitter as the new POTUS, merely trying to minimize the current one’s ability to cause damage via lies and hateful rhetoric. (Things you or I would have been banned for years ago) There will come a time to deal with Twitter’s societal overreach too.
  - tw000001 6y ago
    >lies and hateful rhetoric There is simply no objective definition for either of these concepts and if you may be fine with Twitter having this kind of power now, but you may regret it if the shoe is ever on the other foot. Having a corporate arbiter of truth is antithetical to a free society, especially when creating one's own platform is impractical because of network effects. Who is going to fact check the fact checker? Effectively Twitter has the final word because this is their platform - not because they are correct, and if these political squabbles had an objectively correct answer then we wouldn't have multiple parties. People are find with it right now because it's en Vogue to hate on the president, but that doesn't mean the fact checking is justified or even honest - and I reiterate, the dangerous part here is that people implicitly take Twitter to be an authority when they absolutely are not. Their fact check isn't even accurate, but people don't tend to question what they want to hear. Twitter's role is a neutral party - the same way that journalists are ultimately doing a disservice to society by editorializing everything while claiming to be neutral. It is dishonest and divides society from the top down.
gwright 6y ago
This seems overly simplistic to me and premature. You are declaring "null and void" something that you haven't seen (at least I was unable to find the actual text just now). Obviously any President has lots of legal options when deciding how any law is applied and interpreted. It appears that this is a shot across the bow from a political standpoint or to use another military metaphor, Trump is attempting to shape the battlefield on this issue and there are indeed lots of legitimate issues regarding Section 230.

Johnjonjoan 6y ago

"While signing the executive order on Thursday, the president said he would shut down Twitter if his lawyers found a way to do it. "I'd have to go through a legal process," he told reporters." Cutting off the nose to spite the face

vmception 6y ago
Hm, if I wanted to do it I would hit them with the federal FOSTA-SESTA law targeting their complacency with sex worker's profiles, and also coordinate with states to levy charges related to hosting child pornography and failing federal record keeping obligations (2257a), then use that to assume their normal financial transactions are illegitimate so leveraging wire fraud statutes, and then hit them with securities fraud statues because they lied/omitted information about all those issues to their shareholders, have the SEC freeze their stock, really prepare to get civil forfeiture laws challenged by freezing their domestic assets too under the assumption of illegality in separate charges against their assets instead of Twitter itself. Twitter should be able to beat all of it, but the point would get made and shareholders would bounce as soon as they could. Don't forget to seize the website in the process. None of this represents my opinion. It would be negligent to not notice the tools already exist.
function_seven 6y ago
Assuming he could nuke Twitter off the face of the planet, I wouldn't see it as nose-cutting. His 80,430,710 followers would follow him to Facebook or Instagram. Or even Gab. His direct pipeline would remain intact.
- notahacker 6y ago
  I'm not sure most of them would, especially if it was Gab or something more obscure still. Ironically I think initially at least to get the message across he'd rely on coverage of whatever platform he chose to vent on coming from his other bugbear: mainstream media.
  - function_seven 6y ago

_jal 6y ago

Why does anyone pretend this is about anything other than changing the subject? He's approaching an election with a crashed economy and a plague he doesn't know how to handle. His range of motion thus far has been limited to yelling, whining and changing the subject, and the first two are not working.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

api 6y ago

Little to nothing. The point is to troll and stir controversy in order to get attention. The man literally built his entire career on that, and unfortunately it works extremely well.

kyledrake 6y ago

Does anyone have an actual link to the text of the order itself?

stevula 6y ago
This is the alleged leaked draft from the other day: https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-Preventing-Online-Censorship.pdf https://kateklonick.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DRAFT-EO-...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nojito 6y ago

One thing is for sure. No more ability to cut costs like they have had the luxury to do so thus far.

hn2017 6y ago

Who knew that the right wing would be the one trying to limit free speech of private companies??

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
How does this limit the free speech of private companies? Does a company have free speech?
- newacct583 6y ago
  > How does this limit the free speech of private companies? Does a company have free speech? Yes! And very broadly so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC (Which, as much as it pains me as a hippie liberal to admit it, is probably the best decision in context. Enshrining even things like corporate election finance as "speech" makes is VERY clear that government regulation of actual opinion on behalf of private entities is verboten. At the time none of us saw Trump coming, but if the price for protecting a twitter correction is a bunch of Comcast-funded PACs? Yeah, I'll pay that.)
newacct583 6y ago
Yeah, that's the truly horrifying thing here. As others are pointing out, the EO itself is just theater, precisely because the actual first amendment of these companies and their employees protect them from the government (or have so far, anyway). To wit: Twitter has the same right to tell you the president is lying that the president does to speak via tweet in the first place. The thing that strikes me is that the political tribe that crows about this stuff constantly, when faced with an actual attempt by the executive branch to control the speech of private entities... is absent. Where is the HN libertarian debate squad now? Fucking crickets is all I hear. I despair for society.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

I'm reminded of this cheeky comic from 2009[1], which shows Obama in the caves Mt Doom with the ring, inscribed on it "executive privilege" and "state secrets". Not wanting to forfeit its power, he decides to keep it. Now here we are, with executive orders flying out the door. Slowly, surely, we have allowed an unprecedented growth in executive action. Haven't we decided already that it's okay to be in a perpetual state of war since 2001? Why have we allowed the military industrial complex keep us embroiled in foreign wars for half of our lives? And if you want a glimpse at how powerful and non-partisan this complex is, look at the pushback the president received when he tried simply to pull out of Syria. 1. http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-them-all/ http://thisishistorictimes.com/2009/02/one-ring-to-rule-them...

remarkEon 6y ago
The pushback about the Syria pullout was absolutely insane to me. If there was a conflict that was going to trigger a NATO Article 5 invocation that was it. Russia, Syria, Turkey (a NATO member for reasons that escapes me) ... it all had the feeling of a trigger point, and still people wanted us to keep lobbing missiles and sending troops to a conflict we had no business being involved in.

dang 6y ago

The main thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342161

ordu 6y ago

Politicians are trying to turn everything into politics. A politician was caught on a lie? The lie is insubstantial, because an accusation of a politician is politics by definition, isn't it?

torrzza 6y ago

It would be really funny if Twitter decided to just ban Trump's account outright. Preferably some three or four weeks before election.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kerkeslager 6y ago

So, at this point, the Covid 19 death toll has surpassed 100,000. Even if we can only attribute a small fraction of those deaths to Trump's complete negligence and mishandling, Trump's actions have led to more deaths than September 11--Trump has literally killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden. So I don't think we need to talk about Section 230 to show that he's a terrible president. That said, I'm having trouble seeing how Trump is wrong in his application of Section 230. Section 230 was intended to protect free-speech platforms by allowing them to eschew editorial control without being held responsible for what users say. If Twitter starts exercising editorial control, then doesn't that mean that they should be held responsible for what's said on their platform? This strikes me as Twitter wanting to have their cake and eat it too: they don't want to the legal liability of editorial control, but they don't want the bad PR of allowing free speech on their platform. If we're actually basing our laws and their enforcement on principles, then we a) have to decide whether Twitter is a content platform or a communication platform, and b) we can't just abandon our principles because Trump accidentally says something correct.